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LDRA Patents Automated Management of Software Requirements

LDRA, provider of the most complete automated software testing technology with tools covering the most critical phases of the software development lifecycle, has created new technology that automates the administration and traceability of software requirements. This patent-pending technology automates the techniques and tools for the integration of requirements traceability with software testing and verification. On completion, the technology will be integrated into TBreq, the portion of the LDRA tool suite devoted to requirements-driven testing.

LDRA’s patent-pending automation of requirements-driven testing and traceability addresses an urgent need in safety- and mission-critical industries such as avionics, medical, defense, and nuclear where requirements traceability and verification consume a significant portion of project budgets. The technology automatically captures requirement information for software development projects from a wide variety of sources and simplifies the construction of a requirements traceability matrix (RTM).

Building on proven technology that verifies software to the most exacting industry standards, LDRA has reached beyond the time-consuming, manual techniques associated with managing requirements traceability and is proud to unveil a solution for automating the construction of requirements traceability matrixes and enforcing the industry-accepted best practice of placing requirements as the focal point for software development and testing. The new technology enables developers to:

Establish a baseline of selected software requirements from which development and testing will begin

Delegate the tasks associated with each requirement to members of the development team

Associate source code with each requirement, thereby automating the creation of trace relationships

Refine source code mappings to the level of class or even individual functions

Verify requirements according to a wide variety of analyses and tests performed on the mapped code

Automatically link requirements, test cases and code coverage results in a unified view of all levels of testing

“Although requirements’ traceability and verification is often imposed on suppliers contractually, more suppliers recognize that requirements-based testing is essential for successful projects even when not requested,” noted Ian Hennell, LDRA’s Operations Director. “However, when companies attempt to construct and maintain a requirements traceability matrix, they quickly learn the truly onerous nature of system and software verification. What LDRA has developed will significantly ease the pain of requirements’ administration and traceability, slashing costs and reducing time lines.”

The integration of this patent-pending requirements software management is expected to launch at Embedded World 2009. These powerful new features will be integrated into the TBmanager Dashboard area of TBreq v3.0, bringing TBreq a quantum leap forward in its ability to manage complex, many-to-many relationships among requirements in multiple levels of a requirements hierarchy. The new TBmanager Dashboard will make this matrix readily accessible and visible to the developers’ workstation for verification and will automatically link test results to enterprise-level reports and a centralized requirements repository.

Attendees at Embedded World can view a demonstration of management of software requirements with TBreq v3.0 at the LDRA pavilion in Hall 10, Booth 320.

About the LDRA tool suite
The LDRA tool suite has been derived from many ground-breaking testing techniques developed by LDRA. The LDRA tool suite assists with the eight primary tasks: traceability verification, design, code and quality review, unit testing, target testing, test verification and test management. Focus on all of these key areas is required to achieve an organization’s software development and maintenance goals. The LDRA tool suite can be used by an entire project team, including developers, QA managers, test engineers, project managers and maintenance/support engineers, to automate the software development lifecycle. Through the deployment of the LDRA tool suite, companies are able to deliver well constructed, documented and tested software and benefit from significant time, cost and operational savings.

About LDRA
For more than thirty years LDRA has developed and driven the market for software used for the automation of code analysis and software testing of safety critical applications. The LDRA tool suite is used in the aerospace, space and defense technology industries as well as the nuclear energy and automotive industries. Through the use of the LDRA tool suite companies ensure that their systems are built in accordance with prescribed standards and are durable and reliable in use. The LDRA tool suite is available for a variety of programming languages and supports a wide range of host and target platforms. LDRA is represented world-wide with its head office in the UK and subsidiaries in the USA as well as through an extensive distributor network.